by Matthew Crow
“I’ll know for next time.”
The doctor made his way to the foot of the bed and scribbled some notes the folder which he then slid back into its holster. “You’ve been under a lot of pressure recently?”
“You could say that,” I said, easing myself back into bed, suddenly exhausted from my three minute day.
“Things been playing on your mind?”
“I guess.”
The doctor nodded as he made his way to the door. “I’m going to send someone down to speak with you.”
“Who?”
“Just a colleague who might be of some assistance. Things can get on top of you and... ”
“I don’t need a head doctor.”
“The bandages would suggest otherwise.”
“You know what I meant,” I said, forcing myself upright.
The doctor shook his head and placed his hand on my arm. “Take it easy. No-one’s going to force you to do anything you don’t want to do, okay?”
“I don’t need to talk. I have to go home.”
“In time,” he turned and made his way back to my bed. “In the meantime there are some forms that need filling out. Personal details, insurance information and the like. Pretty rudimentary. Usually they’d have been filled out by whoever brought you in, but, well, you know. You must have some busy friends. Well, here you go. Only when you feel up to it.” He left the coloured sheets on the wheeled table along with a slightly chewed pen before turning to leave.
“Doctor,” I said. “The guy who brought me in here, was he... ”
“Was he what?”
“Scarred? You know, his face all messed up?”
He thought for a moment, raising his head as though being fed the answer from some force on high. “Can’t say I noticed. I only caught a brief glance. Besides, we tend to focus our attentions on the horizontal guests. Why do you ask?”
“No reason, just trying to whittle down my options. Process of elimination and all.”
“Well you just get some rest. I’ll be back to check on you within the hour, and you need any more water just pull on that cord there, the nurses’ll see you’re looked after.”
When he was gone I lay back and felt myself drift towards sleep. Instead of following my instincts I shook myself awake and picked up the leaflets he had left me to complete. They were colour coded, with carbon copies beneath. Name, age, date of birth, address... all the usual requests and tiny black boxes into which I was expected to press my most intimate details.
I stood up and felt a shooting pain down my whole left side. I peeled the tape from the drip and ripped the needle straight out of my arm, allowing it to fall limply to the ground where it traced scratches of red across the tiles of the floor. I rummaged through each of the drawers until I found my clothes and readied myself as quickly as I could, wincing as the collar of my shirt caught on the tender bandage at the side of my head.
I made my way past the nurse’s station and all the way down the hall. I had fully expected to be questioned at least once, but have come to realise that people are increasingly reluctant to ask questions when the answers will result in nothing but extra work.
I made it outside and walked straight across the car lot and onto the freeway that circled the hospital like a moat. The sound of traffic became deafening and the afternoon light near blinded me as I took a deep breath. How easy it would be, I thought, to raise my arm and flee to wherever the first kindly stranger happened to be driving, terminating at their final destination. On me I had not a dollar, but I’d survived with less before. If anything my elaborate dressings would elicit sympathy, so I was already one point up on the majority of lone male hitchhikers. I turned away from town, facing the emptiness and the cars and machines that rolled on and on until they disappeared into wherever they were going. It was doable, that I was sure of. But what would be the point? There’d be other towns, other jobs, other friends. And you, of course, I’d always have you. But Michael’s shadow had cast and would now follow me wherever I went, infiltrate whatever I did until eventually - now, next week, next year - I faced it head on.
I turned my back towards the emptiness, the cars rushing towards me and through me like ghosts, and began the walk back into town.
Back at the house his car was parked on my lawn. He sat in my living room, scribbling in a pad. “You’re late,” he said, not looking up.
“No I’m not. I’m right on time.”
“We’re on a schedule here brother.”
“I just need to grab a few things.”
Michael stood up and slid his notebook into an inside pocket. “You ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
He nodded and made his way outside.
We drove for over an hour to a shack out in the wilderness where Michael has been residing these past few weeks. At night I hear nothing but the animals, running in the dark, and the whistling of the late summer breeze, slowly bringing in fall whilst the rest of the world sleeps on. Michael is dead to the world from nine at night until dawn. I envy his ability to sleep at will but can’t say I resent these quiet hours, when I can be alone, and think, and talk to you. I suppose all that is left is Michael’s grand mission, our final day in the sun together. The plan is thus:
In six days’ time the workers on the site are to be paid. Each morning on payday, cash flow permitting, Emmett arrives exactly one hour earlier than usual, this Michael deduced from his newfound ability to observe from a distance. I know the money is of a questionable source, and I know too that in order to save any embarrassing questions, the majority is kept in a safe beneath the tin shack from which the whole operation is manned. Our plan, if you can apply such grand a title to such simple actions, is to turn up precisely fifteen minutes after Emmett and quietly relieve him of his currency. Of course it is far from foolproof. Emmett is more than likely to be in possession of a light firearm, if only to complete his preferred garb. In such instances we will be forced to display our displeasure, though rest assured that no harm will come to him. Then, as Michael so duly informs me, we will have precisely one hour and fifteen minutes until even the most diligent workers are beginning to approach the sight. And even then it could be hours until someone goes to check on the poor man who will, (and this is the minor qualm I have with our agenda) be bound and gagged in his cushioned seat, thus allowing us time to have driven off into the horizon along with our gold, never to be seen again.
I can’t say it pleases me to be part of this. And it just about kills me having to relay this information to you. But trust me when I say I’m doing it for the right reasons.
So think fondly of me, and pray for my safety if it’s not too much to ask. And know that whatever happens, and wherever I end up, I will find a way to your next letter, if you care enough to send one.
With all the love in the world.
Yours,
Always, Jonah
My Dearest Jonah,
The moment I opened your last letter it was as though I had been punctured. I could feel my whole body draining, the sheer effort of life’s basics becoming apparent with each passing second, as if I was sitting in a tub and waiting as the water drained around me, its buoyancy replaced by my own leaden weight. And so I did everything I could to outsmart it. I became a triumph of pragmatism. Efficient to a fault. I tidied my room, placing my collections in galleried arrangements and amassing my detritus into some form of a waste pile. I made my own bed despite the protestations of housekeeping. I got ready. I painted my sallow face in the bathroom’s cruel light; added colour to my cheeks, added a smile to my lips and two wide strokes across either eye. I fixed my hair and wrapped a coat around my lessening frame. With nail scissors I punctured a fresh hole in a leather strap to secure the trousers that now fall down around my curved hips. I wore heels and sunglasses and forced myself to stand upright. Then, for the first time in any number of weeks, I stepped outside. I had imagined the light would be the biggest shock, blinding me like a beast surfaci
ng from hibernation, but the sunglasses eased the burn and in fact the chill of the late summer day caught me off guard. I tightened my coat and slipped one hand in my pocket to touch the letter - your letter, from happier times - which I had folded and secreted defiantly, determined never to let us stray too far regardless of circumstance. I walked past the derelict rooms with their windows of grime and algae, past the empty fire extinguisher and the burning cigarette butt, straight down the staircase towards the parking lot where my car sat, coloured flyers flapping beneath the rusted wiper. I was unsteady on my feet at first, having planed no distance greater than the length of my room for God knows how long. I found myself vulnerable and shaky, as though trying to control the body of another, as I made each step with care, frightened that a light breeze alone could carry me flailing and flying into the ether like a dropped dollar bill. I walked down past the strip of stores with their dimmed neon signs and their triple locked doors and eventually came to a small patch of parkland. I made my way down the winding footpath, glancing occasionally at the kept lawns and the strange trees with leaves that shifted on the breeze like a waving crowd. I began to slow my pace and noticed that some, only some, were beginning to brown and curl ever so slightly as a new season began to take root. I sat on a bench and let the warm wind blow across my face, breathing deeply and letting myself mindlessly become part of the day at large, of the world, of the sounds and the smells and the feel of the uneven ground beneath my feet. Two children ran past, laughing at first, and then becoming more frantic in their pursuit. Far above them a balloon floated on a clear path before rising and rising until it merged with the coarse lunchtime light. Mothers with babies sauntered to and fro, their enjoyment of the day overriding any impetus of route or schedule. A gang of scholarly youths lay like a pile of rope, their arms and legs tangled in and out of one another as they read aloud from a browning paperback. I breathed in deeply and let the smell of freshly cut grass work its way to the back of my throat. For a moment, the day disintegrated around me. My eyes blinked like the shutters of a slide show. I saw Eve barely able to breathe for laughter, and felt a sudden thump of anguish like the first time I ever stepped foot in The Iguana Den, alone and lost. I saw the walls of my trailer and the veiled prospect of whatever may come next. I saw your words in front of me like jewels, and my hand slip perfectly into yours; all of it seeming to matter so much more than that what surrounded me, than the here and now. How, I wondered, had each person arrived that day? What had made them come to this place, at this time? What were their intentions? Their objectives? And were they succeeding in their mission? They seemed happy enough, all of them, and placated in a way I found alien. They existed in the moment as if that in itself was of some major significance. Whilst I, on the other hand, was adrift, and frightened, one leg straddling the past whilst the other hovered over the future’s murky pool. How I would have loved to ask each and every one of them whether they felt as I did, whether they were as perplexed as I by the mysterious waltz of a weekday afternoon. I began to feel more and more uncomfortable. It was as if this small stroll had been my one chance to extinguish whatever fire was building inside of me, and it had proved wholly ineffective. So I stood back up, blinking tears from behind the dark rims of my glasses, and made my way back, back to the room, back to behind closed doors where nothing seemed to matter anymore, where I could simply be, alone, and wait. You see I can bear a lot, Jonah. I can bear most things in life if truth be told. And I can certainly withstand lacking. I can go days without food, without water. I can make it, if forced, on the paltriest rations of sleep. But without you I am not so certain. It is as though even when I can’t have you by my side, my entire world exists for you. Each day, each moment is there only so it can be relayed to you. Observed by you. Everything I did mattered when I knew that it was being processed by another, played out for something greater than myself. Without you I don’t exactly live. In fact I seem to do the opposite of living, whatever that may be. And so now what? You make your choices, which I must assume to be correct, and you alone shoulder the consequences. But what about me? Where do I truly fit into all of this? Because I need you the way most people need food, need love, need air. And selfishly part of that means I need you to feel the same way. Is this the case? I may not always have been entirely honest with you, but my deceit was never more harmful than omission of specifics, of gilding and merging what was already there. I never once lied, Jonah, not in the traditional sense. I felt my heart slow its rhythm as I read your proposition, of the damage that you were to cause. And then nothing. No word. No news. Until, of course, four days ago. I assume you know what I speak of. You see I heard nothing of a robbery of some backwater building sight. Nothing about two ex-felons gorging like kings on the wages of one down at heel town. I did, however, hear about the famed author - the voice of small town America and he of half a dozen pennames - and his brutal demise. I heard about the way in which an octogenarian’s arm was snapped like a branch and his throat slit ear to ear. I heard about his driver being shot twice in the back, and his esteemed art collection being bundled into the trunk of a stolen car. I heard about his granddaughter... my God, Jonah, she was nineteen-years-old. She was still a child. They say it’s a miracle that she survived. If you ask me the miracle is how she’ll go on living after what three masked men did to her. Please tell me you had no part, in that aspect at least. I then heard about the robbers with mysterious, exotic names - names which play on the tongue like the stone of some strange fruit, names not of these shores - who fled the scene in separate vehicles. I heard about the gunshot wound that claimed the eldest, and the police chase that led to the crash and the coma into which the driver so inconveniently slid. And I heard about the third member, the one who held the knife, and his infuriating escape. I heard how a hundred eyes are now scanning his whereabouts, about the manhunt and the warnings and the bounty on his head. I heard about sightings of him in other states, in other towns, free and liberated and wanted by thousands. That was the moment this rot set in, Jonah. Was everything you told me a lie? Are these sheets little more than the ink of some poetic fantasist? Or is there some truth within? It makes no sense to me, and I’m as confused as I am frightened. Confused all the more that even as each gruesome detail emerges from my screen I find myself hoping, praying, that you were the one that got away. That somewhere you are out there and that I am tender in your thoughts. You frighten me as much as you please me, Jonah, and that is not as it should be. But still I need you, God help me that’s the truth of it no matter how hard I try. But with each passing day I feel part of you disappearing and that emptiness is so great, so vast, that it starts to suffocate me. The prospect of life without you is something I am never willing to contemplate. And so all I can do is hope. Hope that somehow these words find you, and that they find you well. And hope that somehow, someday, you will find a way to respond.
Be at peace Jonah, wherever you are, and know that I will always be here, always waiting. For you, only you.
With all my love,
Always,
Verity
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